Many forms of communications now use the Internet as a backbone network. This allows a more comprehensive set of control capabilities to be offered to users for different forms of communication, such as voice, video conferencing, email, instant messaging, and other forms. This rich set of control capabilities is facilitated by using graphical user interfaces on communication devices that allow easy selection of control options by the user, and allow detailed information to be provided in response to a user's search requests.
These communication devices, often in the form of smartphones or computers, often offer tools to aid in storing, organizing, and searching contact information. These tools are useful for organizing the user's personal contacts, which can include contact information for various forms of communication with a person. For organizing enterprise-wide information, enterprise based tools may be used to organize contact information. Typically, users do not desire to popular their entire business enterprises' contact list into their smartphone. Enterprise-wide tools can be used, for example, to identify a colleague in the same enterprise based on job function and can provide enterprise contact information to the user (e.g., telephone number, email address, IM address, etc.).
If the name of the person to be reached (“target” or “target contact”) is known beforehand to the user initiating the communication (“user”), the identification of the target's communication information may be as easy as looking up the person's name in the user's smartphone or enterprise based contact search engine. If the target contact is not a work colleague, but a person from another enterprise, then the user's enterprise directory may not be useful in ascertaining the target contact's communication address information.
Thus, it can be difficult to determine the target's contact information if the target's name information is 1) not maintained in the user's smartphone or laptop, and 2) not a work colleague. The user can rely on public directories to ascertain the target contact's published telephone number, but many times even the telephone number information is not generally available. Further, public directories frequently do not contain the target's email address, IM address, or address forms. It is even more complicated if the name of the target is not known, and the user only desires to speak to a person with a particular job function, skill set, or location in a different enterprise (e.g., customer service manager for a retail store in a certain location).
In many instances, identifying the appropriate target individual is implicitly based on the user's location. For example, initiating a request to identify a customer service manager for a particular retail store may be predicated on the particular retail store based near the user's location. In many other instances, the appropriate target contact is implicitly associated with an enterprise that has a business relationship with the user's employer (i.e., the “user's enterprise”).
Thus, providing information to a user's search request for establishing communications with a target contact depends in part on the user's location and previously established business relationships. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.